Smoking, Lung Cancer, and Obesity Rates in the USA

The chart above by the World In Data is a striking piece of data visualisation, showing us how lung cancer and cigarette sales are strongly related to each other.

However, given that cigarettes are also an appetite suppressant, I have always wondered what the chart would look like if we include obesity rates. Obesity started becoming a problem more or less when cigarette sales started to drop.

This isn’t to imply that one directly caused the other, but it does warrant some investigation. Anyway, I decided to replicate the famous chart and include obesity rates in it.

The main difficulty plotting this is that obesity rates are really high (up to 40% of the population) whereas lung cancer incidences are far lower (up 70 people per 100000 men, so 0.07%). It would’ve been tempting to make the lung cancer incidence chart way smaller, but that would’ve been a bit misleading. Being obese is of course far less bad than dying from lung cancer.